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Jonathan Haidt is psychologist who primarily researches how people come to ethical opinions/actions. This book takes an evidence based look at some big ideas of philosophy and great thinkers through history about how to be happy.


It uses a pretty wide array of illustrations of ideas, referencing scenes from The Godfather to demonstrate social strategies, Edwin Abbott's Flatworld, and using the Bible, Buddha, and Machiavelli to present the history of ideas, then examines some of the experiments by modern psychologists that are applicable to those ideas. It's not a perfect book and I won't claim to agree with every conclusion made, but it's fairly easy to follow the difference between citing research and conclusions drawn from that research.


I have a hard time judging the approachability of this one because I've read a disproportionately high number of books in psychology, but it doesn't seem to assume that much knowledge. It does get somewhat dense and technical at points, and I intend to give it a second read, but I believe it's something you can follow without a strong background if you know what you're getting into.

It covers a wide range of ideas from structural elements of the brain, to childhood development, the role of trauma in personal growth, religious experiences, psychedelics, and how ideas about ethical decision making differ and contribute to happiness. It's a lot, packed through with citations, but it's reasonably well structured and presented. Overall, if you read everything printed in psychology you'll recognize a lot of the research, but might think about some of it in new ways. If you haven't read much, it might be a bit daunting but even if you miss details I think you could take away a lot of understanding of how our brains work by reading this book.

Malcolm Gladwell is a different type of psychology book than I usually read. He has a place introducing ideas in broad strokes, but it's a lower tier of informative than books written by psychologists who have broad understanding of the research and have done some original study of their own. If you want an extremely accessible introduction to the idea of expertise and the value of practice, this is OK.


If you want a well sourced, more comprehensive understanding of what the research does and doesn't say, and how to apply the principles supported by the research, read Peak by K Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. It's denser, but it discusses some of the flaws of Gladwell's presentation and is overall held to a more rigorous standard.

This is the Bias Bible. If you want to get a brief overview of how your brain works, and lots of information on how you aren't the rational actor you see yourself as, this is the book.


Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on human judgement covered in this book, and played a key role in the development of the field of behavioral economics. If you read one book on the brain, this is the one.

This book is a lot. It starts with cosmology and the Big Bang, goes into particle physics to explain what dark matter is, touches on theories of the origin of life, finally gets to the fossil record and what that tells us about mass extinction events, goes into some concepts of probability theory and statistical significance, then describes large scale features of the Milky Way and our solar system's traversal through it.

All of this is used to illustrate her idea (which she is very careful to describe as speculative and a “thought experiment”) that there is a disc of dark matter, much thinner than the distribution of normal matter, through the central plane of the galaxy, and that the spike in gravity caused by this disc is responsible for knocking objects out of the orbit of the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system every 30-35 million years and sending big spikes in the number colliding with Earth, causing mass extinction events including the death of the dinosaurs.


Randall is very clear, though out the work, that some ideas are not established yet and should not be taken as factual, but she does heavily reference other academic work on the variety of fields involved. As a nonexpert I am unable to verify all of the background material, but provided there are no glaring omissions or misrepresentations I believe she makes a compelling case for her theory.

Overall this book is densely packed with a lot of science and will take some thought to follow, but the frame of her “dark matter killed the dinosaurs” hypothesis allows the book to flow reasonably well.